The decision of the United States Supreme Court [1] is so nakedly partial that it marks another terrible stage in that country’s decline. Which, all things considered, has been precipitous for the last 20 years or thereabouts. So much so that it has prompted one or two of our religiously- minded friends to wonder if it is in fact Divine Justice. The retribution being for the Invasion of Iraq in 2003, as clear an example of arrogant stupidity as any latter-day Aeschylus could wish for. However, we at LSS are cautious about invoking mystical explanations when more prosaic ones might do. We think that when the US triumphed in the Cold War between 1989 and 1991, the seeds of its own destruction were sown by the economic and cultural processes thereby unleashed.
The defeat of the USSR, it was asserted, marked the final triumph of Liberal Capitalism. All countries would now be open to the free flow of goods, capital (financial and human) and the services and technologies which would ensure a slowly rising tide of prosperity . Yet its architects, optimistically, overlooked one part of the deal. Most people, in most countries, most of the time, don’t like Foreigners. This is a central and ineluctable part of human nature. To deny it is as futile as to deny the urges to breathe, eat or have sex. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to listen was aware of these tendencies building long before the rise of the internet or the Crash of 2007-8. These things merely provided opportunities, and speeded up, processes of resentment and suspicion which were long in gestation.
That America was the leading Capitalist nation placed it at the forefront of these trends. Which are now playing out in the form of institutions and communities riven along political lines, and where the notion of Objective truth is now almost forgotten. If this was the Enlightenment-founded nation par excellence, what hope for the rest of us?
The task now for anyone with a hold on education, reason or logic to see that those virtues are now preserved in some way, and gifted to future generations. For currently political power is passing to a series of Autocrats who will soon style themselves as Kings and Emperors. In such regimes, what is the precise value of a scientific reading or a tonne of cement, beyond what The Leader says it is? In such circumstances, trade will shrivel, learning become futile and any hope of advancement lost. But until we confront the truths about human nature (or at least about 99% of it) progressives. will be doomed to failure. Because the autocrats understand it better than we do.
[1] Was Donald Trump a king as president? The US supreme court thinks so | Moira Donegan | The Guardian
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Learning, Science and Society 